"Not at all," I replied, "but it would take me all night to tell you the course I run in this matter, and fatigue you after your misadventure to listen."
"I think it would do me good," he said more earnestly than he had yet spoken; "I am really impressed with a desire to know how such a transformation could take place, and you come to embrace what you were brought up to hate. As to my strength and ability to listen, I am about as well as usual, but miss my tobacco sadly. My meerschaum probably lies in the drift that had nearly been my winding-sheet." I went to the hall and despatched a servant, who soon returned with a box of clay pipes and tobacco in one hand, and the missing meerschaum in the other.
"We must be in a remarkably primitive region to find this again, and without reward," he cried, looking tenderly at the old friend. "Now go on," he added, after the first puff; "begin at the beginning, where you used to be flogged about every Sunday for going reluctantly to catechism. Oh! if there is any one thing more than another that upset that old cross-grained theology of our childhood, it was those dreaded Sundays; when, after two sessions of Sunday-school, two long sermons, and an hour's sitting on the Westminster Divines, we were allowed some spiritual sugar-plums in the shape of the Memoir of Nathan Dickerman, Life of Mrs. Harriet Newell, or some other questionable saint. Yours was a large family at home, and did not feel what it was to be the sole recipient of the full vials of reprobation. What saved us from being arrant hypocrites or open infidels?"
Though I questioned in my own mind how far my friend's religion was from infidelity, I replied, "The fact that we felt that our teachers' hearts were better than their creed; for surely never did there exist a man more free from every taint of hypocrisy than my honored father, who held tenaciously to the five articles agreed to by the Synod of Dort, which represented most of the Calvinistic churches of Europe, looked upon Calvin's Institutes as binding next to the Bible, and I believe worshipped this terrible God in whom he believed with the most earnest faith."
"And you a Catholic!" he said, striking his hands together. "Excuse me if I repeat what I said. I cannot see how you have bettered the matter, since the Catholic Church holds to total depravity and foreornination, and moreover excludes all from any hope of salvation who do not bow their necks to her yoke."
"Excuse me for flatly contradicting you, but the Catholic Church does not hold the doctrine of the total depravity of the human race; on the contrary, she ever teaches that man did not lose by the Fall the image of God, or his own free will, or the powers of his reason. But you asked me how I became a Catholic. I am more interested in telling you that than in refuting what her enemies say of the church, because that you can find in books any day; but you must allow me to echo your surprise when I see a large, earnest soul like yours satisfied with a simple negation of faith."
"Satisfied! if by satisfaction you mean certainty, I say no; for I do not believe it is to be found. The best, I find, is to follow the light that comes to me," he added, with, I thought, a shade of sadness in his tone; "I broke the fetters of Calvinism with a bound, and when I had started, there was nothing for me to do but to cut loose from everything traditional, and rest solely on reason. But tell me of yourself, for any man who is in earnest, thinking for himself, I respect, be he Mormon or Mohammedan."
"I thank you for my share of the respect," I replied, "though I do not consider it very flattering. I never was a Calvinist; my earliest reason rebelled against the teachings, and many a snubbing did I get in my youth for daring to question—'cavil,' it was called. I went through all the phases of the system, trying to believe as I was taught; for I had large human respect and strong desire to please, with a devout turn of mind, making many a violent effort to be in a condition to become, what my friends wished, 'a professor;' but my conscience was too clamorous to allow me to pretend that I had 'obtained a hope,' or 'experienced religion.' Invariably, after a few weeks of fervor, I settled back into a state of indifference or doubt, although, to please my father, I was a constant attendant on all 'inquiry-meetings' and 'anxious-seats.' When I think of those meetings and the self-constituted teachers, who came there to hear the confessions, and to guide anxious souls in the road to heaven, a flash of indignation passes through my frame. About five years after, we parted as school-mates; you for the South and a stirring business life, I to New-England and the meditative days of a student. I was attracted and fascinated by the specious talk of transcendentalism; it was my first taste of liberty. I read, thought, and dreamed; tried to feed my soul on naturalism, and to renounce everything supernatural; talked very flippantly about the God in everything as the object of my worship; but my hungry soul was unsatisfied; there was a cold, dreary chilliness, and undefined nothingness, a rejoicing in uncertainty, which brought nothing like food to my spirit. This faith (if it deserves the name) flattered my proud heart, giving me the 'genus homo' as an object of worship; but I saw plainly that it could never reach the needs of humanity, and though 'brotherhood' was its watchword and cry, it could never be a religion for the masses. It was only for the refined, the cultivated, the gentle, and the good. Where were the abandoned, the dissolute, the coarse, vulgar herd to find a God in such a snare? I often asked myself this question, and this specious infidelity gave me no answer. Of the Catholic Church, I am ashamed to say, I then knew nothing, except that I had often heard her called 'the mother of harlots,' 'Babylon,' 'the scarlet woman,' and such like attractive names, but it did not once occur to me that I ought to examine her claims; floating as I was, seeking for foothold, she was not presented to my mind as an object to be looked at or feared, only to be despised. At that time I was associated with many of the purest and noblest spirits, longing and feeling after God by the dim light of nature; trying to think him out for themselves; finite minds blinded by vain efforts to comprehend the infinite. The first genuine wave of affliction brought me to a standstill on the brink of the abyss that says there is no God. I lost my mother; she was one of those timid, fearful souls, and had not that 'assurance' of which Calvinists make their boast; the words spoken of my precious mother after her burial nearly drove me wild; they snapped the last cord that bound me to the iron system of opinions which had thrown their shadow over my young life. Three years of rushing into the world to drive away thought followed this terrible blow, and then came a blessing—the best blessing of my life."
"A wife?" questioned my friend, as I paused a moment in my recital; "a wife, yes, I have it," as a smile twinkled in the corners of his clear grey eyes and spread over his handsome face; "I see it, she knocked the transcendentalism out of you with the Catholic hammer."